I last left you in sunny Perth where we were contemplating our next step: a tour of the South West. With Christmas and New Year fast approaching time was short, and so we hired a car together and headed south.
South by Southwest
This was the home video that Hitchcock made before his more famous film.
The first stop of our travels was Bunbury, a nice enough place, rated the second biggest city in Western
Australia. Now I’ve no idea who, in Australia, determines what counts as a city and what doesn’t but it seems as if anything with a ‘McDonalds’, a ‘Dick Smiths Electrical Store’ and enough people to have them both occupied concurrently, qualifies.
Next stop was Busselton which is famous for its pier, reputedly the longest wooden pier in Australia, which stretches 1.9km out to sea. It’s an ‘interesting’
structure with large holes in parts of the walkway, big enough for a small car to fall in to, covered by loose bits of board. As it happens 2 weeks after we were there a section of it caught fire and was destroyed. So now they have two piers, both considerably shorter than the original.
Dunsborough
I’d first heard about Dunsborough whilst perusing some tourist brochure back in Kununurra.
It is the last resting place of HMAS Swan which was a Destroyer Escort scuttled in December 1997 (I guess ‘scuttled’ was a term invented by the navies of the world to show that certain ships are at the bottom of the ocean through deliberate action, as opposed to carelessness). She is big (L:112.8m x W:12.5m x H:23m) and lies upright in 32m of water. It was prepared and ‘sunk’ specifically for diving, and consequently lacks a little of the ‘spookiness’ that you normally find with wrecks but allows lots of easy access to different parts of the ship. The dives there were fantastic and it was great to be able to move through the ship and go into the Bridge area etc. The picture in the gallery gives you some idea of what we saw.
During Lunch we even saw a pod of Humpbacked whales heading South.
Between Dunsborough and Pemberton
So what is between Dunsborough and Pemberton ? Well there’s
Yallingup, excellent for surfing apparently and the Ngilgi Cave – not so good for surfing but excellent for stalagmites, stalactites and vegemites. Then there’s Margaret River with its famous Wineries and one armed glass blower – honestly, an amazing guy – he even let us have a go. After that Augusta – probably named after the winds that they have there – and Cape Leeuwin, the most South Westerly point of the Australian mainland and where the Indian Ocean meets the Southern Ocean. Complete with lighthouse but strangely, no Theme Park !!
The South Western Forests
The South West of Australia is famous for its forests of towering Jarrah, Marri and Karri trees. It’s a far cry from the arid
bush land to the north. These trees can reach well over 60m and the forests are spectacular.
Some of the tree’s, used as fire lookouts, can be climbed using large metal pins that spiral up and around their trunks. This is not for the faint-hearted as there is basically nothing of note to stop you from falling the 50m or so to the ground – apart from blind faith and a will to live !! The view from the top, though, is quite spectacular ! We ended up climbing both the Gloucester Tree (60) and the Dave Evans Bicentennial Tree (68m) and yep – they’re scary !!
Nearer the coast the trees change to giant Eucalyptus (red, yellow, Rates and Red flowering) which are unique to the area. The Giant Tingle Tree, just outside Walpole, has a girth of 24m and The Valley of the Giants has a tree top walk which rises 40m into the canopy of these massive trees. Like the trees, it also sways a lot in the wind !! All quite breathtaking.
Albany and the Stirling Ranges
At Albany we found our first McDonalds, KFC and Hungry Jacks (Burger King) of our South West excursion and yes, Albany’s a city !!
Something strange happened in Albany. We did the touristy things: The Blowholes, the Gap, Natural Bridge etc. and at Natural Bridge we were taking photos when Adam decided that they needed livening up and, after disappearing briefly behind a rock, Natural Bridge suddenly became
Naturalist Bridge !!
We were speechless – not to mention the other tourists that had appeared in the mean time. The gauntlet was laid.
That afternoon we were at a tourist free, Castle Rock in the Porongurup National Park when Pauline and Katy decided that it was their turn. Shelley and I looked at each other…..Bugger !
The next day we continued our journey and headed towards Esperence. On the way we stopped off at the Stirling Ranges – a set of hills that rise dramatically from the otherwise flat plains. The highest point in the
Stirling’s is called, maybe appropriately, “Bluff Knowle”. It was time to rename it !!
Esperence
The road to Esperence is long and straight – one section has only a couple of very small kinks during its 160km length, otherwise it’s perfectly straight !! Amazing to see, boring to drive.
Esperence is named after a French ship that harboured in the area during a storm and has some beautiful beaches. While we were there we were able to go horse riding on the beach (Shelley got a closer look at the beach than most) and
Sand boarding; which involves hurtling down large sand dunes on a board, whilst simultaneously filling your mouth with as much sand as possible. Good fun !
Kalgoorlie
After Esperence we headed north to our last stop on this epic journey, the frontier gold mining town of Kalgoorlie (Kal to those in the know). Founded in 1893, it’s a quite
prosperous town and the place from which Adam, Shelley and I would be getting the train out east. Being a frontier town its a bit rougher around the edges than most but that just adds to its appeal.
Being a hard working mining town it obviously needs to be able to entertain the miners when they aren’t working.
Skimpy bars are the norm in Kalgoorlie, where scantily clad barmaids thoughtfully give their customers pints of beer to drool into.
Apparently, there used to be an organised tour of one of the other attractions of Kal – the brothels – but rumour has it that it had to stop as after just a few stops most of the punters had mysteriously disappeared….
“Parting is such sweet sorrow…”
So after almost 6 weeks of traveling together it was time to finally go our separate ways. Pauline and Katy were heading back to Perth and Adam, Shelley and I were going initially to Adelaide and then on to Melbourne. It was pretty sad saying goodbye, we’d had our ups and downs but we’d all survived in tact and had had a good time together.
On the evening of Monday 13th December we boarded the Indian Pacific train bound for Adelaide……but that’s another story.
Talk to you soon
Iain
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